Lot Essay
Exhibited in Julian Schnabel's first one man exhibition at The Pace Gallery in 1984, Vita fully reveals the mature development of Schnabel's plate paintings. With the plate paintings, Schnabel dramatically challenged the depiction of space and the two-dimensional picture plane in the spirit of Picasso, Schwitters and Rauschenberg. The plate paintings were a further development of Schnabel's interest in surfaces. As René Ricard noted in Schnabel's retrospective exhibition catalogue for the Stedelijk Museum in 1982:
Julian has always had surface anxiety in his work. A painting was never enough for him, and without knowing where it would lead, he was always doing more than just painting on them, to make them physical presences. He would poke holes in them, build shelves on them...I can see how someone could look at a Schnabel and see plates where I don't see plates at all. I see surface aggression. I see a logical extention of brushstroke and surface (R. Ricard, "About Julian Schnabel," Julian Schnabel, Amsterdam 1982, p. 3).
Schnabel's imagery also began to intensify as the plate paintings developed. Reference to personal experience, Greco-Roman classical symbols, spiritual and cultural recollections, literature, films and art history became his sources. In the catalogue for Schnabel's 1984 exhibition at The Pace Gallery, Gert Schiff states:
Pagan sacrificial imagery converts in the paintings of the eighties, to related elements of Christian imagery. The change does not alter the content, but the feeling in which it is expressed. The sense that humanity belongs to nature by the fact, almost the gift of sharing mortality with other natural beings, is portrayed now with a certain sacramental sheen. Vita extends into the Christian sacramental format the presence of the goddesses of pre-Christian religions. Vita evokes nature as a universal female principal undergoing the sacrament of sacrifice and death everywhere all the time. As in the plate paintings, the figure restates with an altered tonality what the archaeological-site ground has already stated beneath it. As the earth filled with shards (the mud of Mudanza) is a fertile swampy place where things sink in and rise again in different forms, so the goddess hanging on the tree or cross is nature constantly recycling its forces and appearances through a process like death and birth at once. This area of Schnabel's work--its pantheistic enthusiasm presented through a mixture of pagan and Christian images, and its symbolic incorporation of painting into a death and fertility cult--relates, among classical Modernist forebears, to Picasso (G. Schiff, "Julian Schnabel and the Mythography of Feeling," Julian Schnabel, New York 1984).
Julian has always had surface anxiety in his work. A painting was never enough for him, and without knowing where it would lead, he was always doing more than just painting on them, to make them physical presences. He would poke holes in them, build shelves on them...I can see how someone could look at a Schnabel and see plates where I don't see plates at all. I see surface aggression. I see a logical extention of brushstroke and surface (R. Ricard, "About Julian Schnabel," Julian Schnabel, Amsterdam 1982, p. 3).
Schnabel's imagery also began to intensify as the plate paintings developed. Reference to personal experience, Greco-Roman classical symbols, spiritual and cultural recollections, literature, films and art history became his sources. In the catalogue for Schnabel's 1984 exhibition at The Pace Gallery, Gert Schiff states:
Pagan sacrificial imagery converts in the paintings of the eighties, to related elements of Christian imagery. The change does not alter the content, but the feeling in which it is expressed. The sense that humanity belongs to nature by the fact, almost the gift of sharing mortality with other natural beings, is portrayed now with a certain sacramental sheen. Vita extends into the Christian sacramental format the presence of the goddesses of pre-Christian religions. Vita evokes nature as a universal female principal undergoing the sacrament of sacrifice and death everywhere all the time. As in the plate paintings, the figure restates with an altered tonality what the archaeological-site ground has already stated beneath it. As the earth filled with shards (the mud of Mudanza) is a fertile swampy place where things sink in and rise again in different forms, so the goddess hanging on the tree or cross is nature constantly recycling its forces and appearances through a process like death and birth at once. This area of Schnabel's work--its pantheistic enthusiasm presented through a mixture of pagan and Christian images, and its symbolic incorporation of painting into a death and fertility cult--relates, among classical Modernist forebears, to Picasso (G. Schiff, "Julian Schnabel and the Mythography of Feeling," Julian Schnabel, New York 1984).